Heilsgeschichte

See also: heilsgeschichte

English

From German Heilsgeschichte.

Heilsgeschichte (uncountable)

(theology) History seen as the work of God's salvation. (Especially, in Christianity, the history of the Old Testament, seen as a preparation for the coming of Christ.)
- 1959, Guthrie/Hall, translating Oscar Cullman, The Christology of the New Testament, p. 306:
  Without a divine Heilsgeschichte it would not make sense to speak of Jesus' ‘deity’. He would then simply be one of the heroes of history—nothing more.
- 2007, Terry Eagleton, The Guardian, 4 Dec 2007:
  He was not a Leninist because he would have had no conception of historical self-determination. The only kind of history that mattered was Heilsgeschichte, or salvation history.
- 2008, Jill Bradley, You Shall Surely Not Die, vol. 1, p. 71:
  The much greater iconographic programmes of the other three Bibles mean that a sort of pictorial Heilsgeschichte can be given spread throughout the work: in the Bamberg it has to be compressed.
(by extension) Any interpretation of history as leading to eventual well-being, as e.g. in Marxism.

history seen as the work of God's salvation

Heil (“salvation”) +‎ Geschichte (“history”).

Heilsgeschichte f